HOUSE OF BUTT

BUTT: What can we find in the House of BUTT?
Maciek: There are two floors. There’s an office up top, and a playspace down below, with a darkroom, bar, and gloryhole cruising area. Once you come down for a drink, you’re greeted by the face of Frank Redieß overlooking the bar. Let’s imagine there are dolls in the house already, even though we can’t see them – I tried to include details that indicate a narrative. A stool has fallen over for some reason. There are bottles everywhere. I wanted Frank to overlook the bar, because when I read his interview in BUTT no. 34, it really seems like he’s the person holding Ficken3000 together. He’s always there, like the Eyes of T.J. Eckleburg from The Great Gatsby.
So, we’re witnessing the aftermath of an office party. Work hard, play hard.
Exactly. From the bar you can go either to the gloryhole – where you have a chair for your convenience, you don’t have to go on our knees if you don’t want to – and then you have the mask in case you want to cover your eyes and experience the thrill of not knowing who’s entering the cubicle. There are a pair of legs coming out of one of the cubicles, which come from Paul Sepuya’s feature in the new issue, ‘Hotshots’ – which then takes you to the other darkroom space. If you look closely at the walls in the darkroom, Paul is looking at you from every angle. The mattress in the middle is like a stage. There are condoms, dildos – whatever you prefer.
Love this narrative.
I built this whole thing in the bench space on the second floor of the Royal College of Art building, which is a very heteronormative space. It was quite an interesting experience sitting there for three weeks cutting dicks and asses!

When did you start making tiny furniture? Did you play with dolls as a kid?
Of course I did! I can’t remember how many dollhouses I had, but there’s one that stands out: it was like a fake Barbie Dreamhouse, but with plastic columns at the base instead of walls. In Poland in the ‘90s and early 2000s, the economy was horrible and there was never any money for anything. I remember the day my mom first bought me a Barbie…the magnitude of that event! I thought, A, that’s so expensive, and B, don’t tell anyone. Like it was a shameful thing, but I couldn’t really understand why.
But she got it for you anyways. Your mom sounds fab.
She’s an icon. That was the Barbie, but the house wasn’t Barbie. It was a knockoff, with cardboard walls with printed interiors. Late ‘90s, American style, opulent McMansion aesthetics. I loved it. I would draw images of it, and then later I would make copies of the doll houses with Lego bricks. I guess you could trace my journey in architecture back to the dolls’ houses.

And now you’re making doll houses for your architecture degree?
What really kickstarted the project was the 2020 Polish presidential elections. The guy who got re-elected went onstage and said that LGBT ‘ideology’ was worse than communism. His words sparked this really problematic discussion in Poland, and the creation of ‘LGBT free zones’ around the country. When I moved to London, I realized how queer the Polish diaspora is. I started meeting queer Poles around London and interviewing them. I wanted to look at the medium of a doll’s house and use it to build an indexical portrait of a person. The doll’s house is a kind of spatialized queer code.
It’s a sign. Like having the BUTT book on your bookshelf.
Exactly. One of my subjects had a whole BUTT archive, so I decided to use the magazine’s pages to wallpaper his doll house. It was one of the details I picked up on in his studio. In creating a miniature version of each subject’s bedroom, I wanted to emulate them through something from their real bedroom. I’m casting a silicon house next week for a drag queen. Her silicon breastplate was the most prominent thing in her room!